As the commemorative mass for the 21 Christians beheaded by ISIS in Libya was held on the 40th day after their deaths in the village of Al Our in the Minya region of Upper Egypt this past Friday, a mob identified by witnesses as Muslim Brotherhood protestors attacked the home of one of the martyr’s families, set fire to the car of one of the mourners, and later lobbed molotov cocktails at the site of the church being constructed in their memory. Al Our village was the home of 13 of the Egyptian Coptic martyrs.

On Friday, scores of mostly young Muslims gathered in the Minya governorate after midday prayer, demonstrating in front of a church under construction there. They chanted that there is no way the church would be built.

After a while, the crowd vanished, but later in the night a smaller number of anonymous militants attacked the church with Molotov cocktails. In the attack, seven people were injured, and one car was left burning.

In February, Copts in Minya’s Our Village called for a church to be established in the village honouring 20 Coptic Egyptian workers beheaded in Libya. They died at the hands of Islamic State militants in Libya, according to religious freedoms researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) Ishak Ibrahim.

Thirteen of the beheaded Coptic workers were from the village. Ibrahim told Daily News Egypt that, during their funeral, Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb said President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi agreed for the church to be built.

Coptic residents bought land and started the church’s construction, sparking protests from Muslim residents who were angered by the church. The Muslim residents were unhappy at the church’s proposed presence and its position at the entrance to the village.

A report yesterday by Al-Masry Al-Youm (AR) stated that the mob attacked the home of one of the martyr’s families with bricks and stones, and that a car belonging to a mourner who had traveled to the village for the memorial mass was set on fire. The article cited witnesses identifying the mob participants as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that seven protesters had been arrested.

Protesters surround Virgin Mary Church, set fire to car, & attempt to storm home to stop construction of Minya Church http://t.co/2dkinX6CMR

Following the murder of the 21 Christians by ISIS in Libya, senior government officials, including the prime minister, flocked to the village to give their condolences, and announced that that “the Church of the Martyrs of Faith and Country of al-’Our” would be built in their honor at state expense with the permission of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

And yet after this weekend’s attacks, the Coptic community in Al Our were forced by local authorities into an extra-judicial Islamic “reconciliation” meeting, where it was “agreed” that the church would be relocated, submitting to the violent protesters’ demands, and that the seven arrested protesters would be freed, prompting criticism on Twitter:

Egyptian government resorts to reconciliation session in Al Our village after attack on Church https://t.co/dAOyeEkOB0 No accountability

Minority communities complain that the “reconciliation” meetings in Egypt almost always result in minorities having to make concessions while Muslim offenders are freed without having to face any judicial proceedings, as appears true in the present case.

Non-Muslims also complain about the active discrimination built into the Egyptian constitution stemming from the Ottoman era that prohibits the construction of any new church building, or even the repair of existing buildings, without a presidential decree.

Islamist groups use this constitutional provision to instigate sectarian attacks, and continue to use it in several cases to prevent the rebuilding of churches burned down or damaged by the Muslim Brotherhood across the country in August 2013 after the government’s dispersal of Muslim Brotherhood protests in Cairo.

Earlier this month I reported here at PJ Media that U.S.-backed Syrian rebel group Harakat al-Hazm had disbanded, and their U.S.-provided TOW anti-tank missiles had ended up in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria.

Today a video posted on YouTube by al-Nusra shows their operatives using the U.S. TOW missiles to attack Syrian army positions in Idlib. They also posted a statement to that effect on Twitter:

Some D.C. analysts claimed that the TOW tubes in the pictures were empty, but it is apparent now that al-Nusra did get their hands on live rounds and acquired personnel trained in firing the TOW system.

Robert Ford was always one of the Syrian rebels’ loudest cheerleaders in Washington, agitating from within a reluctant administration to arm vetted moderates to fight Bashar Assad’s brutal regime.

In recent weeks, however, Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria who made news when he left government service a year ago with an angry critique of Obama administration policy, has dropped his call to provide weapons to the rebels. Instead, he’s become increasingly critical of them as disjointed and untrustworthy because they collaborate with jihadists.

The about-face, which is drawing murmurs among foreign policy analysts and Syrian opposition figures in Washington, is another sign that the so-called moderate rebel option is gone and the choices in Syria have narrowed to regime vs. extremists in a war that’s killed more than 200,000 people and displaced millions.

Of course, some had argued, including myself, that this is where things were headed all along with the Obama administration’s policy of supporting, arming and training the so-called “vetted moderates.” And now Ford is admitting that the “vetted moderates” supported by the U.S. are collaborating with jihadist groups.

U.S. Ambassador to Libya Deborah K. Jones retired from Twitter on Monday after tweeting out false information on civilian casualties of a bombing raid by military forces of the internationally recognized Libyan government:

Terrible news today from #Tarhouna where 8 innocent displaced #Tawergha killed in air strikes. This violence serves no one's interests.

Her tweet was picked up by Western media as the primary source for the information. See this Reuters article:

Eight civilians were killed in an air strike near Tripoli on Monday, the U.S. ambassador said, as Libya’s internationally recognized government pressed on with an assault to recapture the capital it abandoned to a rival faction last year …

“Terrible news today from Tarhouna where eight innocent displaced Tawergha killed in air strikes,” U.S. Ambassador Deborah Jones said in a tweet, referring to members of a minority group, thousands of whom were displaced after Gaddafi fell.

“This violence serves no one’s interests,” said Jones, who is based outside Libya since most diplomats were evacuated from Tripoli last year.

It turned out that the information was based on rumors and conflicting information from both sides:

The eastern chief of army staff said in a statement its planes had hit a Libya Dawn barracks, not a Tawergha camp, demanding an apology from Jones.

But Mohamed al-Tarhouni, spokesman of the town’s municipality, said nobody had been killed in the strike which he said had hit an empty farm near a camp of displaced Tawergha.

Jones and Louai El-Ghawi, an eastern lawmaker, said there were reports that several family members of a colonel opposed to Libya Dawn had been killed in Tarhouna in an apparent revenge attack, but details were unclear. The eastern chief of staff said Dawn supporters had killed eight members of the family.

A freelance reporter on the scene found nothing describing the info that Jones had tweeted out:

@SafiraDeborah I saw by myself 3 impacts of the airstrike, I can guarantee no one was killed because of it 1/2

A Cairo criminal court sentenced Mohamed Badie, the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme guide, and 13 other leading members of the group to death on Monday for inciting murder in the now infamous case known in the media as “Rabaa control room.”

The 14 convicted include Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson Mahmoud Ghozlan, former Kafr El-Sheikh governor Saad El-Hossainy and preacher Salah Sultan. The court has also set the date of 11 April to announce its verdict concerning other defendants in the case.

The court has referred the death sentences to Egypt’s Grand Mufti for revision. The referral of the sentences to the Mufti is the first step in the legal process required to enact a death sentence. The Mufti’s decision is not binding. However, following his decision the court will issue a final verdict. Once a final verdict is issued, defendants can appeal.

Badie and another 13 Brotherhood figures are convicted of setting up an operation after the violent dispersal of the Rabaa Al-Adaweya protest camp in mid-August in 2013 to direct the movements of Brotherhood supporters across the country as part of plans to defy the state and spread chaos, as well as plot attacks on police stations, private property and churches.

Soltan was arrested in September 2013 as he tried to flee to Sudan, and was charged with incitement to kill and attempted murder.

His son Mohamed, who has become a cause celebre for the American media and U.S. Islamic organizations, was also convicted in the current case and will be sentenced on April 11:

Mohamed's father, Salah Soltan, has been sentenced to death.. Mohamed sentence will be on April 11
#FreeSoltan#SaveSoltan

The story of Salah and Mohamed Soltan will not be unfamiliar to regular PJ Media readers.

Just last week, Mohamed Soltan was trying to paint himself in court as an innocent spectator swept up in the aftermath of deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi’s overthrow. I noted here that multiple Western media reports at the time identified Mohamed as one of the top leaders organizing the violent Muslim Brotherhood protests in Cairo following Morsi’s removal from office.

Salah Soltan has also been the subject of several of my reports here at PJ Media going back to January 2009 when he appeared on Al-Nas TV threatening America with death and destruction for its support of Israel.

At the same time the elder Soltan was threatening America on Middle East TV, his son Mohamed was seen leading anti-Jewish genocidal chants in front of the Ohio Statehouse (as I reported here last week):

Salah Soltan was also a leading figure at the Muslim Brotherhood protests dispersed by Egyptian authorities in August 2013, even appearing on stage at the protest standing beside an al-Qaeda flag:

Our late PJ Media colleague Barry Rubin noted here in August 2011 that Soltan had issued a fatwa in Egypt authorizing any Muslim to kill any Israeli that could be found in the country. He also took note of the media backlash I had received for reporting on Soltan’s extremist activities and open support for Islamic terrorism.

I followed up Barry’s report with my own observing everything I had written about Salah Soltan going back to my first report in April 2006. Despite all the attempts by the establishment media to paint him as an interfaith moderate, I chronicled a lengthy list of his activities:

Sultan leading a Hajj tour with al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki following the 9/11 attacks (after Awlaki had been allowed to leave the country);

His appearance at a July 2006 pro-Hamas rally in Turkey featuring leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and the prime minister of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh;

Sultan’s attendance at a July 2007 conference in Doha, Qatar, where he shared the speaker dais with the head of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, and Yousef al-Qaradawi;

His December 2008 appearance on Egyptian Al-Nas TV (which I reported on here at PJM) warning of the imminent destruction of the U.S., invoking notorious Islamic hadith calling for the extermination of the Jews by Muslims, and citing approvingly the Protocols of the Elders of Zion;

His March 2010 interview on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV, where he invoked the blood libel claiming that Jews make their Passover matzos with the blood of non-Jews;

And following the killing of Osama bin Laden in May, in an article published on the Muslim Brotherhood website he lauded bin Laden as a warrior who “had raised the banner of jihad for the sake of Allah and had served a lofty goal,” and stating that U.S. “terrorism” was greater than bin Laden’s.

A year later, Salah Soltan was a senior member of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. As I reported here in August 2012, Soltan could be seen in his new role visiting with a number of U.S.-designated terrorists and Islamic extremists across the Middle East.

Those who have followed my reporting here and elsewhere on Salah and Mohamed Soltan know that my continued interest in their activities was not merely academic, as the pair were my former neighbors in my hometown of Hillard, Ohio.

The elder Soltan even served as religious director of our local mosque, the Noor Islamic Cultural Center.

That story was covered in the 2-part documentary by The Blaze titled The Project. My PJ Media colleague Andrew McCarthy and I were interviewed:

When Mohamed Soltan burned down their family home in Hilliard as part of a staged “Islamophobic” hate crime in January 2012, Soltan repeatedly cited in sworn testimony that my writings, that documentary, and Erick Stakelbeck’s October 2007 CBN News report on their presence here incited the arson. Here’s that 2007 CBN News report:

And yet court documents in a later civil case indicate that investigators fingered the younger Soltan for the crime, and he fled the U.S. for Egypt in February 2013 as investigators were looking to question him further on his role in the fire.

Now, nearly a decade into this saga, I expect that no apologies will be forthcoming from the various media outlets and local figures who publicly attacked me for reporting on this, including our local newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch.

The establishment media needs to be more forthcoming in reporting on extremism inside the Muslim community. Salah Soltan, now sentenced to death for his crimes, was not some marginal figure in the American Muslim community, but one of its leaders. And those organizations that continued to support him in the face of the mountain of evidence compiled over the years should be subject to some hard questions. But I’m not holding my breath.

As I’ve said here at PJ Media repeatedly, there are some ideas so profoundly stupid that they can only be taken seriously inside the political-media-academic bubble that stretches along the Washington, D.C.-New York-Boston corridor. These typically populate my annual year-end “National Security ‘Not Top 10′” review.

Such is the case with this week’s foreign policy “smart set” MEME OF THE WEEK: we need to accept “moderate” al-Qaeda in order to defeat “hardline” ISIS.

So why are the foreign policy elites now having to talk about engaging “moderate” al-Qaeda, of all things?

Because all of those previous “moderate” engagement efforts have ended in disaster. But rather than abandon the whole “moderate” theme, the foreign policy community seems intent to double-down on failure by continuing to move the “moderate” line.

Since 9/11, Washington has considered al-Qaeda the greatest threat to the United States, one that must be eliminated regardless of cost or time. After Washington killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, it made Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s new leader, its next number one target. But the instability in the Middle East following the Arab revolutions and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) require that Washington rethink its policy toward al-Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri. Destabilizing al-Qaeda at this time may in fact work against U.S. efforts to defeat ISIS.

Here’s how Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, billed this conventional wisdom:

There are several problems with Mendelsohn’s thesis. One problem that he barely acknowledges is that al-Qaeda is still a declared enemy and an active threat to the United States. They have said repeatedly that they intend to kill U.S. citizens and have continued to plot to do so. The enemy of my enemy can still also be my enemy.

A second pragmatic problem with trying to use Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria, as a tool against ISIS is that the relationship between the two groups is constantly evolving. Not long ago, ISIS and Nusra were comrades-in-arms. Despite their present falling-out, within recent months they still occasionally worked together: in August they joined forces to attack Lebanese border checkpoints; in September they were engaged in joint operations around Qalamoun. And Nusra appears more interested in wiping out the U.S.-backed “vetted moderate” groups and fighting the Assad regime than going head-to-head with ISIS.

Thus, it is considerably more likely that ISIS and al-Qaeda will engage in some form of reconciliation than al-Qaeda falling into the U.S. foreign policy orbit and serving as an anti-ISIS proxy in Syria.

So what drives the folly of the foreign policy “smart set”? Mostly it is the hubris that only they comprehend the vast and constantly changing complexity of international affairs, but also it is their added belief that their pals in the administration can harness this “smart set” omniscience to manipulate global events to a predicted end.

That rarely, if ever, happens. Just witness the Obama administration’s foreign policy disaster in Syria.

MOUNT BENTAL, Golan Heights — This mountaintop on the edge of the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights offers a unique vantage point into how the complexities of the Syrian war raging in the plains below are increasingly straining Israel’s ties with the U.S.

To the south of this overlook, from which United Nations and Israeli officers observe the fighting, are the positions of the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda that the U.S. has targeted with airstrikes.

Nusra Front, however, hasn’t bothered Israel since seizing the border area last summer — and some of its severely wounded fighters are regularly taken across the frontier fence to receive treatment in Israeli hospitals.

To the north of Mount Bental are the positions of the Syrian government forces and the pro-Iranian Shiite militias such as Hezbollah, along with Iranian advisers. Iran and these militias are indirectly allied with Washington in the fight against Islamic State in Iraq. But here in the Golan, they have been the target of a recent Israeli airstrike. Israel in recent months also shot down a Syrian warplane and attacked weapons convoys heading through Syria to Hezbollah.

It would be a stretch to say that the U.S. and Israel are backing different sides in this war. But there is clearly a growing divergence in U.S. and Israeli approaches over who represents the biggest danger — and who should be seen, if not as an ally, at least as a lesser evil in the regional crisis sparked by the dual implosion of Syria and Iraq.

A couple thoughts on this. First, some have treated the report of Israelis helping injured Nusra fighters in the Golan as some breaking game-changing news, but in fact Vice News reported on this back in December.

Secondly, I reported from the Golan here at PJ Media back in September 2013, and I even stood on Mount Bental and looked over the ruins of Quneitra while fighting raged across the border. And yet, that perspective didn’t help me magically see al-Qaeda as some lesser evil that we needed to engage or accept.

Thirdly, and I know this will strike some as heresy, the Israelis are not infallible and have seen this approach literally blow up on them. Take, for instance, the January 2009 Wall Street Journal article, “How Israel helped spawn Hamas“:

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor’s bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile’s trajectory back to an “enormous, stupid mistake” made 30 years ago.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric. [...]

When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and ’80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”

“Nobody thought about the possible results.” Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.

I should note that this is not the first time that the foreign policy “smart set” has taken a run at the “engaging moderate al-Qaeda” meme. In January 2014, Foreign Affairs published an article titled “The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-Sham” which contended that the U.S. needed to “befriend” the Syrian jihadist group Ahrar al-Sham as some kind of counter to more extreme jihadist groups, like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. The precedent they cited was the U.S. failure to designate the Taliban (!!!) after 9/11.

The article was originally subtitled “An al-Qaeda affiliate worth befriending”:

But after the article authors took some flack on Twitter for their much-too-obvious “an al Qaeda affiliate,” the subtitle was quickly changed to “an al Qaeda-linked group worth befriending” on the Foreign Affairs website:

This seems to give evidence that the foreign policy elite know exactly what they’re doing when making these arguments. For fear of the unwashed masses catching on to the dangerous game they’re playing, they’ll quickly try to walk things back to keep the appearance of being nuanced, smart, and sensible as they talk amongst themselves about befriending terrorist organizations.

Another telling sign is that when this article appeared there was ZERO blowback from the foreign policy “smart set.” Much like the articles from Mendelsohn and Trofimov this week, they received widespread praise and acclaim from their peers.

I mentioned earlier the hubris that drives much of this thinking. But an added element of this phenomenon is the obliteration in our political, media, and academic elite of any distinction between good and evil.

Such distinctions are perceived as archaic and naive, while suggesting “befriending” terrorists is nuanced and realist. And yet the 20th century is littered with examples of these two factors (elite hubris, no distinction between good and evil) working in concert to horrific effect.

Recent history has examples as well, such as when the Obama administration decided to engage “moderate” al-Qaeda leaders in Libya, including LIFG head Abdelhakim Belhadj (whom the CIA had renditioned back to Libya in 2004) to overthrow Gaddafi at the behest of the warhawk trio of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. How well has that worked out and how many lives has it cost?

Probably no more than what will come from following the foreign policy elite’s MEME OF THE WEEK, accepting “moderate” al-Qaeda.

UPDATE: FBI Director James Comey told Congress this week that Al-Qaeda, which we are supposed to now “accept” according to the foreign policy elite, is still a threat to the U.S.:

Al Qaeda and its affiliates—especially al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)—continue to represent a top terrorist threat to the nation and our interests overseas. AQAP’s online English magazine advocates for lone wolves to conduct attacks against the U.S. homeland and Western targets. The magazine regularly encourages homegrown violent extremists to carry out small arms attacks and provides detailed “how-to” instructions for constructing and deploying a successful improvised explosive device.

Egyptian-American Mohamed Soltan is currently on trial in Egypt for his role in organizing and directing the violent Muslim Brotherhood protests in 2013. The protests wracked Egypt following the massive June 30 protests that led to the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi.

He is charged with being part of the operations cell that ran the main Muslim Brotherhood protest at the Raba’a Al Adeyawa mosque in Cairo. His cause has been touted by major U.S. media outlets, including the New York Times, as well as by prominent U.S. Islamic organizations. It was also highlighted on Twitter with the #FreeSoltan hashtag:

From his statements recorded before the court earlier today, it seems he is no longer interested in being a Muslim Brotherhood revolutionary activist. He now wants to recast himself as an innocent “humanitarian activist” who was innocently caught up in the events of August 2013.

This is an abrupt about-face and a thoroughly fictitious re-writing of history. He actively craved international media attention for his activities at the Rabaa protest.

Supporters of Soltan attending the trial hearing today and his relatives and supporters back home tweeted out his claims that he has no political affiliation, and his claim now that he is just a “humanitarian activist”:

Soltan: "I have only been in Egypt for 2.5 years in Egypt. One of them spent in jail. I have no political affiliations at all".

His claim to be an innocent bystander to the events at the Rabaa protest is exposed by the very media reports he cultivated. For example, the following account from The Australian dated August 1, 2013, opens with Soltan in firm control of the Rabaa operations war room and giving direction to subordinates:

Just after 9pm on Tuesday (5am yesterday AEST), the tacticians of the Muslim Brotherhood went into a small room off the Rabaa al-Adawia mosque in Nasr City, an outer suburb of Cairo, to decide the night’s battle plan.

They had declared there would be “a million person march”, so expectations were high.

In this undeclared war with Egypt’s army, tactics are kept a secret until the last moment. At 9.15pm, Mohamed Soltan, one of the communications team of “The Anti-Coup Movement” based at the mosque, walked back into the room.

“Ten o’clock at military intelligence,” he said. “We’ve already got a demonstration going to the presidential palace, but another one will be going to the military intelligence building.”

From this mosque the Muslim Brotherhood is running its campaign to reinstate Mohammed Morsi, who was sacked from the presidency by the army on July 3.

Tonight we’re in the communications room which is bustling with media, Muslim Brotherhood officials and teams of young men and women who look like they’re running an election campaign.

Requests by foreign journalists are given top priority – reflecting an instruction from Brotherhood officials to get their “anti-coup message” out to the world.

An Egyptian-American, Soltan, 25, joined the Anti-Coup Alliance after former president Mohamed Morsi was ousted. Soltan became one of the main liaisons between the Muslim Brotherhood, the Anti-Coup Alliance and foreign press and ABC News saw him in action during a visit to Raba’a Al Adeyawa two weeks ago. His iPhone 5 always in hand, he moved seamlessly between meetings with former Brotherhood ministers to strategy sessions with the Anti-Coup social media team.

It was a bit odd, then, when CNN’s Christiane Amanpour described Soltan’s plight as “the crime of acting your age.” These were media reports that Soltan himself developed and his supporters used to promote his cause, and now they stand as a witness to the #FreeSoltan lies.

And just what about his supposed “humanitarian” activities?

As I reported at the time of his arrest, when several of Soltan’s friends were caught and arrested with torture victims at the Rabaa protest, he admitted to Mada Masr (cited as “a son of a leading Muslim Brotherhood figure”) that the torture (amputations, electrocutions, etc.) was going on at the protest that he organized and directed, but that the torture wasn’t officially sanctioned, and in fact his friends were merely “helping” the torture victims they were caught with.

Yeah.

We can also present this exclusive cell phone video of “humanitarian activist” Mohamed Soltan leading an anti-Israel protest at the Ohio Statehouse on January 2, 2009. Dressed in a red hoodie with a megaphone tucked underneath his arm, he led the crowd in the genocidal and anti-Jewish “Khaybar” chant (beginning ~0:20):

Here’s a picture of him at that protest looking much as he did at the Rabaa protest — on the phone and choreographing the activity:

A report on Al Jazeera in Ara­bic yes­ter­day described “Khaiber” as “the most impor­tant fea­ture of the Islamic-Jewish fight. Mus­lims always raise its name in their ral­lies against Israel because it con­sti­tutes a mem­ory of a harsh defeat for the Jews who lived in the Ara­bian Penin­sula dur­ing the time of prophet.”

The story of “Khaiber,” accord­ing to most Islamic sources, ends with the exe­cu­tion of thou­sands of Jews, includ­ing women and chil­dren. Pro­test­ers at anti-Israel ral­lies around the world, includ­ing the U.S., often evoke this bat­tle in their chants to gal­va­nize supporters.

There’s additional video one year later of the “humanitarian” activism that Soltan engaged in with George Galloway’s “Viva Palestina Hamas” support convoys. The U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995. Soltan hosted fundraisers for Viva Palestina – in Columbus, Ohio – after Galloway had appeared live on Al-Jazeera TV giving duffel bags full of cash to U.S.-designated Hamas terror leader Ahmed Kurd on a previous Viva Palestina convoy.

He has also praised as “freedom fighters” Hamas terrorist leaders, such as Khaled Mashal (seen here), and the “Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) school that breeds” them on Facebook and Twitter (screencap, now since removed, thanks to CausingFitna):

At ~10:37 in this Iranian regime PressTV video documenting the travels of the Dec. 2009-Jan 2010 Viva Palestina Hamas support convoy, and their clashes with Egyptian police during which one Egyptian police officer was killed, you can see the interview they had with Soltan:

The Egyptian government, not the Egyptian people, because the Egyptian government is not allowing us because they are a puppet for the American and the Israeli regime. We need to be there. We should have been on the border of Rafah and entering Gaza today to be with the people of Gaza to tell them that we came from half way across the world to be with you on the anniversary of a holocaust, the second holocaust. And that’s what we try to do, but instead we’re here standing in Aqaba in front of the consulate asking God that he open the borders for us and help us get through Gaza so we can be there with our brothers in solidarity with our brothers in Gaza.

Soltan is bold about his self-promotion when he is talking to the international media, but as we saw today when he was brought to account before the Egyptian court, he tries to distance himself from his own actions. Now he tries to rewrite his own history to save his skin.

If he is spared additional jail time by the Egyptian court, it will most likely be due to the “American regime” he is so quick to denounce overseas before the cameras owned by an Iranian regime, among the most repressive in the world.

———————–

By the way: Soltan burned down his own house in a faked “Islamophobia” hate crime.

According to court documents, he directly blamed me for inciting the “arson,” only to flee the U.S. as investigators began to question his role in the fire. Alas, I’ll leave that for a my next installment of the “Lies of #FreeSoltan.”

Reports this week revealed that a U.S.-backed Syrian rebel group, Harakat al-Hazm, had officially dissolved itself under pressure from Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria, and many of the fighters have joined up with the jihadist Islamic Front. With the group’s dissolution, the U.S.-provided TOW anti-tank missiles have reportedly falled into the hands of al-Nusra.

As I reported throughout the past year here at PJ Media, the U.S. reliance on the so-called “vetted moderate” groups was doomed to failure for no greater reason than that these groups were never moderate to begin with. Back in July I was reporting that U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) units were defecting to ISIS.

As Congress approved an Obama administration request in mid-September for an additional $500 million in support for the “vetted moderate” rebel groups and the U.S. began bombing ISIS positions in northern Syria, Hazm issued a statement condemning the U.S. bombing campaign, calling it “an attack on the revolution.”

…the simple fact is that any fool with a pair of eyes and not blinded by the foreign policy establishment’s narrative could see this result coming. In fact, a few of us, myself included, warned of this end game going back to when the conflict in Syria began in 2011. And here we are.

With the Middle East in tatters in the wake of Obama’s “Arab Spring,” it is past time for the D.C. foreign policy establishment to admit to total failure. The evidence of this bipartisan policy disaster is written across the map.

As Instapundit is wont to say, this has all happened rather… unexpectedly.

Six individuals of Bosnian origin from St. Louis; Rockford, Illinois; and Utica, New York, were indicted last month on charges of supplying money and equipment to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

And yet late last week it was revealed that one of those terror suspects, Nihad Rosic, who is also one of two suspects additionally charged with conspiring to kill and maim others in a foreign country and had attempted to board a plane back in July 2014 to fly to Syria to join ISIS, had actually been apprehended in the small town of Plainfield, Indiana, right outside Indianapolis.

A Bosnian national indicted on charges of funneling resources to terrorists overseas was arrested earlier this month in Plainfield, officials confirmed Friday, but it was unclear why the man was in Indiana.

U.S. marshals booked Nihad Rosic, 26, in the Marion County Jail on Feb. 6, jail records show, though his connections to the state appear to be minimal.

A federal indictment alleges that Rosic and five others communicated on social media with coded language to organize financial support and send equipment to terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq.

Jan Diltz, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, where the indictment was handed up, said she doesn’t know why Rosic was in Indiana.

While at first glance it may seem odd that Plainfield, Indiana, might be a haunt for an international terror operative for perhaps the most dangerous Islamic terrorist group in the world today, it perhaps might be more clear when considering that Plainfield is the headquarters the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), one of the most terror-tied Islamic organizations in American history.

As one former federal law enforcement official told me this weekend, if Rosic was not in Plainfield related to ISNA it would be an “extreme coincidence bordering on the unbelievable.”

ISNA’s ties to terrorism go back even before its founding in the early 1980s when the organization was operating in the Indianapolis area as an amalgam of Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, including the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Islamic Teaching Center (ITC) and the Muslim Student Association (MSA). I’ve previously reported on the MSA’s extensive terrorist lineup here at PJ Media.

Two of the visitors to the area in those early days included Al-Qaeda founder Abdullah Azzam and his protege, Osama bin Laden.

According to a book published by Bin Laden’s first wife, Najwa, the Al-Qaeda leaders and the Bin Laden family visited the U.S. for two weeks in 1979 with stops in Los Angeles, and yes, Indianapolis. A clue why Bin Laden and Azzam might have been in the area might be an ITC newsletter dated February 1978 I uncovered that documents a previous visit to their Indianapolis offices in January of that year by Azzam and several other well-known extremist Islamic clerics. ITC now operates as a subsidiary of ISNA.

From its earliest days ISNA was a hub for international Islamic terrorists. Terrorist figures associated with ISNA include:

Al-Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi, who started ISNA’s political action committee in November 1988 and who was convicted in 2004 for his role in an international assassination plot targeting then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. In 2005, the U.S. Treasury Department admitted that Alamoudi had operated as one of the top Al-Qaeda fundraisers in North America.

Senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian, one of ISNA’s self-admitted founders, was convicted in 2006 for his role in supporting the terrorist organization and was deported from the U.S. last month. Prior to his indictment, Al-Arian was deeply involved in numerous ISNA activities and organizations, and was a regular speaker at the ISNA annual conferences.

Pakistani intelligence agent Ghulam Nabi Fai, who not only worked for ISNA but also served for years on ISNA’s shura council, was convicted in 2012 for failing to disclose nearly $4 million he had received from the Pakistani ISI intelligence service to influence members of Congress on behalf of the Muslim separatist cause in Kashmir (I reported on Fai’s operation in a two-partseries here at PJ Media, noting that Fai spoke at ISNA’s annual convention two weeks before his arrest). Fai’s co-conspirator, Zaheer Ahmad, reportedly met with both Bin Laden and Zawahiri just weeks before 9/11 to discuss their weapons of mass destruction program. As reported in an in-depth ProPublica expose of Fai’s activites, not only was Fai working for Pakistani intelligence at the same time he was working for ISNA, but key ISNA figures and affiliates helped start his Kashmir American Center.

One other senior terror leader with deep ties to ISNA is current Hamas deputy head Mousa Abu-Marzook. I’ll elaborate on the ISNA/Hamas ties below, but will note here that when Marzook was arrested in the U.S. in 1995 and designated a global terrorist by the Clinton administration, and was later deported in 1997, Marzook took out an advertisement in the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs thanking his supporters, including ISNA:

In October 2014, Mohammed Hamzah Khan was arrested trying to board a flight to travel to Turkey to join ISIS. According to postings on Khan’s Instagram account, he had attended ISNA’s annual convention held in Detroit less than a month before.

But ISNA’s role in the international Islamic terror network isn’t just associational. Rather, it has taken a much direct role in supporting international terrorism.

According to forms filed with the IRS, ISNA provided $170,000 in start-up funds for the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), which was designated a global terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury in October 2004 for supporting Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, and other Islamic terrorist organizations. Exhibits entered into trial evidence in court by federal prosecutors showed extensive payments from ISNA to IARA over the years in increments of tens of thousands of dollars. According to the Justice Department, IARA sent at least $130,000 to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Another ISNA-supported Islamic terror charity was the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA). As reported by Thomas Jocelyn at the Weekly Standard, German investigators found transactions between ISNA and TWRA in 1992 at the same time that TWRA was financing the U.S.-based terror cell that conducted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the planned “Day of Terror” attacks targeting New York City landmarks.

Despite evidence of ISNA’s support of a long list of Islamic charities tagged by the U.S. government and the United Nations as terrorist organizations, ISNA’s most notorious role in supporting international terrorism came up in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history in the successful prosecution of the executives of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) for supporting Hamas.

Not only did HLF receive ISNA’s longtime support, but it began as the Occupied Land Fund as an arm of ISNA operated out of the group’s Plainfield headquarters.

So intertwined was ISNA in conspiracy by the international Muslim Brotherhood to finance Hamas, in one court filing federal prosecutors lay out ISNA’s role in providing “media, money and men” to Hamas (page 13 in the file):

ISNA’s terror support was even profiled by Indianapolis NBC affiliate WTHR in a 2003 two-part series entitled “Images in Conflict“:

But if it is the case that ISIS operative Nihad Rosic was in Plainfield meeting with ISNA officials it is highly unlikely that the Justice Department would ever admit to it since ISNA has been the closest Islamic group to the Obama White House.

That’s right, despite what federal prosecutors have said in federal court about ISNA’s role in supporting international terrorism, its ties to convicted terror leaders and supporting designated global terrorist organizations, and even Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez under the Bush administration cancelling meetings because of the presence of ISNA officials, as I noted here at PJ Media in the early days of this administration, ISNA has been openly embraced by the Obama White House.

So what is the connection between Nihad Rosic and ISNA, and why exactly was he arrested in Plainfield, Indiana? Most likely federal authorities will never say, but an educated guess about the possible involvement of ISNA given their lengthy track record on these types of activities is hardly out-of-order.

A man seen in multiple ISIS propaganda videos speaking with a British accent and beheading Western hostages had his identity revealed in the Washington Post this morning, and yet again the suspect is another case of what I have termed “known wolf” syndrome since he was already known to authorities before engaging in acts of terrorism.

The world knows him as “Jihadi John,” the masked man with a British accent who has beheaded several hostages held by the Islamic State and who taunts audiences in videos circulated widely online.

But his real name, according to friends and others familiar with his case, is Mohammed Emwazi, a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and to have later joined the Islamic State, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolize.

But the article goes on to reveal that Emwazi had been detained by authorities not once, but twice:

Emwazi and two friends — a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man, Abu Talib — never made it on the trip. Once they landed in Dar es Salaam, in May 2009, they were detained by police and held overnight. It’s unclear whether the reason for the detention was made clear to the three, but they were eventually deported.

Emwazi flew to Amsterdam, where he claimed that an officer from MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, accused him of trying to reach Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab operates in the southern part of the country, according to e-mails that he sent to Qureshi and that were provided to The Post.

Emwazi denied the accusation and claimed that MI5 representatives had tried to recruit him [...]

In June 2010, however, counterterrorism officials in Britain detained him again — this time fingerprinting him and searching his belongings. When he tried to fly back to Kuwait the next day, he was prevented from doing so.

The Daily Mail adds that after that June 2010 encounter with law enforcement, Emwazi was put on the UK terror watch list:

They allegedly fingerprinted him and searched his belongings, and he was not allowed to fly back to Kuwait. Emwazi was put on a terror watch list and banned from leaving the UK.

The BBC added that Emwazi was part of a known network of jihadist sympathizers:

We don’t know when the British or the American security services worked out that the masked man in the killing videos was Londoner Mohammed Emwazi.

But we do know that he was a “person of interest” to MI5 going back to at least 2011 because he features in semi-secret court cases relating to extremism overseas and back in the UK.

Nobody in official security circles is going to comment on what they know and why they know it.

Emwazi has been previously described as a member of a network involving at least 13 men from London – and at least two of them were subjected to house arrest control orders or T-Pims. One absconded. The chances of Emwazi ever returning to the UK are vanishingly small.

So yet again, as we’ve seen in practically every recent terrorism case, the suspect was already known to authorities.

I’ve reported here at PJ Media on the long line of “Known Wolf” terror suspects who committed acts of terror:

Earlier this month I reported that the Copenhagen shooter was Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, who had been convicted in a stabbing in December, and yet remarkably released by authorities despite being branded as “extremely dangerous.”

Also this month I noted that Moussa Coulibaly, who stabbed three police officers outside a synagogue in Nice, France, had just days before been deported from Turkey for attempting to join ISIS.

Man Haron Monis, aka Sheikh Haron, who in December took hostages at a chocolate shop in the heart of the commercial district in downtown Sydney, Australia, was not only known to law enforcement, but was out on bond on two separate cases and had previously been convicted of harassing the widows of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Authorities had been tipped off via their hotline to extremist statements Haron had been making on his website 48 hours before the attack.

Yesterday, an interview I had with Erick Stakelbeck aired where I discussed the “Known Wolf” terror phenomenon (the first 11 minutes of the program):

Needless to say, if the currently growing track record of Western authorities missing these “known wolf” suspects is any indication, the next terror case will undoubtedly be a subject already known to law enforcement and intelligence authorities, but sufficient action not taken to stop their terrorism.

Breaking news late yesterday and this morning bring reports of an assault by the Islamic State in Northern Syria targeting Assyrian Christian villages along the Khabour River that began early yesterday morning. Other reports indicate that ISIS has taken captives and torched several churches, including one of the most ancient churches in Syria, and hundreds are fleeing the area downriver to Hassake. ISIS is meeting resistance from Christian and Kurdish militias.

Assyrian Christian villages along the Khabour river in the Hassake region are under heavy attacks of ISIS. Hundred of people left the region and number of women and children have been kidnapped by ISIS. Clashes continue between MFS, YPG against ISIS.

On Monday around 5am ISIS carried out an attack on the Assyrian villages in the Khabour region leaving casualties and another exodus of Christians from the region. ISIS attacks are concentrated in the Khabour villages of Til Hirmis, Til Shamiram, Qabre Shamiye and Til Khebish. Local sources confirm that there are ongoing clashes in all front lines against ISIS. Various reports suggest casualties of civilians and burning of churches.

A Demand For Action, another Christian rights organization, published this map to show the area of activity:

The Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) reported late last night of captives taken and churches torched by ISIS (Warning: graphic images at link):

ISIS has abducted dozens of Assyrian men, women and children, including 12 from Tel Hurmiz, 15 from Tel Goran. They have been brought to Jabal Abdul Aziz. The residents of the villages of Tel Shamiran (approximately 50) and Tel Jazira (about 40) are being held captive in their own villages by ISIS.

According to a report by Newsweek, ISIS will use the Assyrian hostages for a prisoner swap with Kurdish fighters.

A number of churches have been destroyed, including the church in Tel Hurmiz, one of the oldest churches in Syria, the Mar Bisho church in Tel Shamiran, the church in Qabr Shamiy and the church in Tel Baloua.

The terrorist organization demanded a prisoner exchange with Kurdish fighters; they are seeking the release of ISIS members in exchange for the villagers. The exact number of prisoners ISIS is looking to swap for is not known. They have threatened the lives of the village men, estimated to be more than 100, if the swap does not go through.

A Reuters report published this morning provides a report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that ISIS has taken at least 90 captives and notes the strategic importance of the area for Kurdish and Christian militias, as well as for ISIS:

Syrian Kurdish militia have renewed their assault on the militants, launching two offensives against them in northeast Syria on Sunday, helped from U.S.-led air strikes and Iraqi peshmerga who have been shelling Islamic State-held territory from their side of the nearby border.

This part of Syria is strategically important in the fight against Islamic State because it borders territory controlled by the group in Iraq, where last year the ultra-hardline group committed atrocities against the Yazidi community.

Tel Tamr, a town near the Assyrian Christian villages where the abductions occurred, has witnessed heavy clashes between Islamic State fighters and the Kurdish YPG militia, the Observatory said.

Here are some related tweets with information on refugees and the militia response to the ISIS attack. Follow David Vergili and A Demand For Action on Twitter for updates.

On Saturday, I expressed serious skepticism here at PJ Media about the “Muslim Peace Ring” that surrounded an Oslo synagogue over the weekend. Here’s what I observed:

Now I’m not going to get into the motives of those involved today, but color me skeptical of these types of events for several reasons.

First, if you contact the international media to cover your event, forgive me if I question your sincerity. Your staged “Ring of Peace” photo op is really a “Ring of Propaganda.” Matthew 6:1-4 and all that.

Secondly, when you use actual victims (Jews) to try to make yourselves (Muslims) the victims by leading your chants with “No to anti-Semitism,” and then smuggling in your own “Islamophobia” narrative, I’m calling BS…

Thirdly, these Muslim “human chain” photo ops are never around when you actually need them.

I gave the example of the “Muslim human ring” around the Mar Girgis Church in Sohag, Egypt story that was circulated in July 2013, only to have the same church torched by the Muslim Brotherhood the very next month.

When Muslims formed a human chain around a church in Sohag, Egypt for photo op, they burned it down weeks later pic.twitter.com/KShm3harnL

But now it seems the media narrative on the Oslo “Muslim Peace Ring” couldn’t even last 24 hours.

As Haaretz reports, one of the event organizers had accused Jews (remember, this human chain was around a synagogue) of being behind the 9/11 attack:

Ali Chishti confirmed on Saturday in an interview with Verdens Gang, a highbrow Norwegian newspaper, that he delivered on March 22, 2008, in Oslo a speech on the alleged involvement of Jews in planning the 9/11 Twin Towers bombings in New York. The speech’s title was: ”Therefore I Hate Jews and Gays,” the paper reported, though Chishti said he was not the one who came up with the title.

“There were several thousand Jews away from work in the World Trade Center, and why there were more Jews in Mumbai when Pakistani terrorists attacked than usual?” he said then, repeating the conspiracy theory that Jews knew in advance of the attack that killed thousands. “Jews are a small group, but everyone knows that they have a lot of power,” he said.

In Saturday interviews, he retracted his words. In an interview with the daily Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, he said they were “anti-Semitic” and “unacceptable.”

“I was angry,” he told Verdens Gang. “I have since changed my views.” But he also said he “dislikes” people who support “an occupying force that has been condemned in several United Nations resolutions.”

“I think it is important to distinguish between being critical of Israel and anti-Semitism,” he also told Verdens Gang.

Eric Argaman, a pro-Israel activist and member of Norway’s Jewish community, said Chishti’s involvement “stained the event, which now feels more like a spin, on our backs, than a gesture of good will.”

Yeah, Eric, there’s a lot of that going around.

Needless to say, well-meaning supporters of the event felt deflated:

Well it was sweet while it lasted. Oslo synagogue 'peace ring' organizer blamed Jews for 9/11 http://t.co/zQZp3XaH0F

Again, having already admitted my own skepticism of these publicity stunts, I find it difficult how anyone can describe a media event being covered by the international media hundreds of miles away (Oslo, Norway) from the actual site of last week’s synagogue attack (Copenhagen, Denmark) as some great act of courage. As I noted in my previous article, these Muslim “human chains” are never around when Jews or Christians actually need them.

But the media narrative on the Oslo event this weekend had not yet completely collapsed:

That’s right. While the international media (AP, AFP, Reuters, et al.) all reported that there were 1000+ Muslims forming the chain around the Oslo synagogue, the reality was something quite different.

The weekend’s feel-good story about a Muslim “ring of peace” formed to “protect” Jews at an Oslo synagogue turned out to be a complete fabrication by the mainstream media, according to an eyewitness report, local officials, and attendees’ photos.

According to a local eyewitness, only about 20 or so Muslims formed the “ring of peace” around the Oslo synagogue. In fact, pictures from multiple angles show that there wasn’t enough people to form a ring, so the locals instead formed a horizontal line in front of the synagogue.

A local news outlet explained how the media got to its “1,300 Muslims” number. “According to police, there were 1300 persons present in the event. Very many of them ethnic Norwegians,” read a translated report from Osloby.no.

Demonstrators also reportedly chanted, “No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia,” conflating criticism of Islam and hatred of Jews.

Photos pulled off of social media appear to corroborate the narrative that only twenty or so people formed the “peace ring.”

So rather than 1000+ Muslims in front of the Oslo synagogue, there were at best a couple of dozen. Everyone else were just well-meaning non-Muslim supporters.

Meanwhile, as reported over at Twitchy, several hundred Danish Muslims attended the funeral of Copenhagen terror killer Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein on Friday, leading several of us to observe:

People are wetting themselves over on Twitter right now after Muslims formed a human chain around a synagogue in Oslo, Norway, yesterday following the terror attack this week at a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Now I’m not going to get into the motives of those involved today, but color me skeptical of these types of events for several reasons.

First, if you contact the international media to cover your event, forgive me if I question your sincerity. Your staged “Ring of Peace” photo op is really a “Ring of Propaganda.” Matthew 6:1-4 and all that.

Secondly, when you use actual victims (Jews) to try to make yourselves (Muslims) the victims by leading your chants with “No to anti-Semitism,” and then smuggling in your “Islamophobia” narrative, I’m calling BS.

More than 1000 Muslims formed a human shield around Oslo’s synagogue on Saturday, offering symbolic protection for the city’s Jewish community and condemning an attack on a synagogue in neighboring Denmark last weekend.

Chanting “No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia,” Norway’s Muslims formed what they called a ring of peace a week after Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, a Danish-born son of Palestinian immigrants, killed two people at a synagogue and an event promoting free speech in Copenhagen last weekend.

When you fail to leave your own agenda at home, this isn’t about protecting victims, it’s about you grinding your “Islamophobia” narrative.

Thirdly, these Muslim “human chain” photo ops are never around when you actually need them.

To emphasize that last point, let me tell you two stories.

The first begins in July 2013 in Sohag, Egypt. After Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was deposed following the largest protests in recorded human history, the Muslim Brotherhood staged a “human chain” photo op in Sohag saying they were going to protect the St. George Church as a show of interfaith solidarity, notwithstanding those filthy infidel Coptic Christians backing General (now President) Sisi for removing Morsi.

The MB’s “human chain” event in front of St. George Church also made international news, with this picture being widely circulated as evidence of interfaith cooperation:

It should be noted that the picture itself is watermarked by the pro-Brotherhood Rassd.com online news portal.

Alas, that’s not where the story ends. Several weeks after their “human chain” photo op, the Muslim Brotherhood torched the very same St. George Church in Sohag following the dispersal of the Muslim Brotherhood protests in Rabaa Square in Cairo.

Here’s a picture of the attack on the Mar Girgis church tweeted out by ABC News foreign editor Jon Williams:

The second story takes place just weeks after the sacking of the church in Sohag.

On September 22, 2013, two suicide bombers killed 127 worshipers at the All Saints Church in Peshawar, Pakistan. Nearly a month after the attack, Muslims staged yet another “human chain” to protest the Peshawar church bombing. Just as today in Oslo, the international media was there pushing all of the predictable progressive “interfaith” tropes:

Just one problem. Ignore the fact that this is nearly a month after the bombings. The Muslim “human chain” protest occurred in Lahore — 250 miles away from the church that was bombed in Peshawar — a fact that didn’t go unnoticed:

So before we start declaring ISIS defeated after the staged event this weekend in Oslo, let me suggest that, as was the case in Sohag, when you burn the church down a couple of weeks after you stage your “Muslim human chain” you somewhat negate your message. Just saying.

And until we see these “Muslim human chains” form somewhere and at a time when it actually makes adifference (e.g. in Copenhagen where the synagogue was attacked, not in Oslo 300 miles away), please spare me your interfaith back-patting narratives. I’ll be more impressed if your human chain shows up when it matters.

UPDATE: So apparently Frank Luntz took umbrage at my calling him out on Twitter.

It’s not clear to me what Luntz is questioning. Both the human chain event and the sacking of the church in Sohag were both widely publicized. Here’s video of the torching of Mar Girgis in Sohag (the same site as the human chain):

With the President’s three-day White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism trending on Twitter and in the news, we here at PJ Media are bringing you this exclusive insider video of an off-the-record secret summit panel discussion today grappling with the “root causes” driving a group of “youths” nabbed in a recent terror arrest:

Qatar’s Al Jazeera network got their hands caught in the proverbial felafel jar today when it recycled pictures of dead children from an accident months ago, claiming they were killed in Egypt’s overnight bombing of ISIS positions in Derna, Libya.

The pictures were posted on both the Al Jazeera website and their Facebook page. The picture has been changed on their website and the Facebook post has been removed, but I did screen capture the Facebook posting:

Several sharp-eyed watchers picked up on Al Jazeera’s image recycling:

Since the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi in Egypt after the massive June 30, 2013 protests, many in the Middle East have grown to see Al Jazeera not as a news network but as an information warfare arm of the State of Qatar and their owner, Qatar’s ruler Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

The tension between the two states could be seen in the international protests devoted to the cause of three Al Jazeera employees that had been jailed in the wake of the June 30th revolution on charges of attempting to undermine the new Egyptian government.

While whole news organizations dedicated themselves to the Al Jazeera employees’ release, highlighted by the #FreeAJStaff hashtag, there was little discussion that Egyptian authorities had repeatedly warned Al Jazeera that they were not properly licensed to broadcast out of the country.

All three of the Al Jazeera employees have recently been released. Peter Greste, an Australian citizen, was released and deported on February 1st. The other two employees, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were released last week on $33,000 (US) bail.

And yet when Fahmy and Mohamed were released, despite more than a year of agitation directed at Egypt for their employees’ release, the network refused to pay their bail:

While the identity of the killer who attacked a free speech event and a synagogue yesterday in Copenhagen has not yet been released, media are now reporting that the suspect is “known to authorities” in what appears to be yet another case of what I have termed “Known Wolf” terrorism. ***Suspect has been identified as 22-year-old Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, who police considered “extremely dangerous.” See more details in updates below.***

So this attack in Copenhagen is yet another in a growing line of terror incidents in the West in recent months where the attacker was already known to intelligence and law enforcement authorities, and yet sufficient action was not taken to protect citizens:

Earlier this month I noted that Moussa Coulibaly, who stabbed three police officers outside a synagogue in Nice, France, had just days before been deported from Turkey for attempting to join ISIS.

Man Haron Monis, aka Sheikh Haron, who in December took hostages at a chocolate shop in the heart of the commercial district in downtown Sydney, Australia, was not only known to law enforcement, but was out on bond on two separate cases and had previously been convicted of harassing the widows of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Authorities had been tipped off via their hotline to extremist statements Haron had been making on his website 48 hours before the attack.

What remains to be seen after this Copenhagen incident is whether Denmark’s very passive “jihad rehab” approach to jihadists returning home after fighting with terrorist groups abroad will come under review. That will especially be the case if the killer in this incident (as yet undetermined) had traveled to Syria or Iraq.

With Canada, Australia, France and now Denmark having citizens killed by these “Known Wolf” terrorists, one has to wonder when the U.S. will be targeted again, too.

I’ll update here as more information is available.

UPDATE: Some details about the suspect starting to emerge:

The Copenhagen shooter was reportedly a 22 year old male who was born in Denmark and known by police for previous crimes.

The gunman believed to have attacked a Copenhagen synagogue and a free speech event on Saturday was a Danish-born 22-year-old known to police because of past violence, gang-related activities and possession of weapons, officers have said.

UPDATE2: Suspect’s name is Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, who police considered “extremely dangerous” and was convicted in a stabbing in December, but was released after 2 months while case was on appeal:

The 22-year-old Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, who is believed to be behind the weekend shooting attacks in Copenhagen, the police considered extremely dangerous and was as late as December 2014, sentenced to two years prison for aggravated assault.

At the time, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein had already been in custody since January 23, 2014.

Still, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein could on February 15, 2015, just two months after his sentencing and after about one year in custody, walk around freely and heavily armed around Copenhagen. (translation)

Jens Madsen, the chief of intelligence service PET says authorities had known the attacker in advance.

“It is a person we knew in advance, so the short answer is yes. He was on PET’s radar,” he said.

Madsen also said that the attacker may have been inspired by the Charlie Hebdo events in Paris and stresses that the attack is a “sign” that the terror threat against the country and Danish targets abroad is serious.

Police charged a Chapel Hill man Wednesday with first-degree murder in the deaths of three Muslim students in a quiet neighborhood near Meadowmont just south of N.C. 54.Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, is being held in the Durham County Jail on three counts of first-degree murder.

Barakat was a doctoral student in UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Dentistry. The sisters were N.C. State University students. Chapel Hill police found all three victims dead at the scene, after responding to a report of gunshots on Summerwalk Circle at 5:11 p.m. Tuesday.

The neighborhood, adjacent to the Friday Center, is mostly rental apartments and modest condominiums. It rarely appears in reports of crime in Chapel Hill. Police worked early into the morning trying to piece together what happened. Police have not offered a motive for the shootings.

[UPDATE: Chapel Hill police are now saying the shooting may be related to a parking dispute with no connection to the victims' religion. Thanks to tarheelkate in the comments.]

Barakat and Abu-Salha were just married a few weeks ago. She had recently graduated from NC State, and he was a UNC dental student.

A review of the Facebook page of the man charged in these murders, Craig Hicks, shows a consistent theme of anti-religion and progressive causes. Included in his many Facebook “likes” are the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, gay marriage groups, and a host of anti-conservative/Tea Party pages.

A sharia court in Texas? What could possibly go wrong? Well, I can think of a few things…

In this segment of Glenn’s interview with the imams, Taher El-Badawi claims that cutting off heads is not just something they do in Islam, but it’s practiced everywhere, including the U.S. (!!!), and that cutting off hands for theft in America would be economical:

Taher : We are ready for any point to discuss with, but the main point here, the reason we are here to discuss this issue what kind of cases Islamic tribunal handle, and you start with the sharia. Why the people afraid from sharia? I’m sorry to say it, one point related to this, cut head is not just in sharia law, just in Islamic law. It’s everywhere. Who said that just in Islamic law? That’s even another sharia, in Jewish sharia, in Christian sharia, in American here, we cut we cut head for some reason.

So, I’m asking you an easy question, if anyone kill another, he should get killed by law, by Islamic law, by government. He should get killed. What is wrong with that? If a thief jump, I’m sorry, to your house, scare your wife, scare your children, scare your neighbor, and they did that with our stores, this is the law, the law to cut his hand because if he feels my hands were cut because of that, he will think about this 100 times. He will never do it. If he do that one time, he will never do it again.

Look how many millions of dollars American here or other states or other states outside spend to keep the criminal in jail, a lot of millions of dollars. We can save that, just let him go, and that’s it, because he did something wrong in the whole community and this kill the whole community. Why not?

OK, then…

One of the other important issues covered in my interview was about the claims that the court will only handle “family issues, includes manners, behavior characters, including marriage divorces, including inheritance law….”

Contrary to what sharia apologists say, these courts are not just about whether you pray five times a day or which foot you enter a bathroom with. It is precisely where U.S. family law conflicts with Islamic law that is one of the greatest concerns some have with the establishment of sharia courts in the U.S.

When Glenn asked whether divorces by U.S. courts would be recognized, one imam admitted that a woman would also need to get an Islamic divorce, and that her U.S. court divorce would not be recognized if she traveled to Islamic countries (the imam specifically mentions U.S. ally Jordan). So U.S. civil law, even by their own admission, isn’t recognized by Islamic law, here or abroad.

And what about the testimony of women in Islamic court? The imams tried to brush it off by saying that it only related to financial transactions, but you only need to go to the IslamQA website where they defend the principle that the testimony of women isn’t the same as that of men.

As I noted in my own interview, a 2011 survey of Middle East countries by UNICEF found that only in Tunisia and Oman (one could also add here Israel) is the testimony of women fully admitted in all judicial proceedings. In most Middle Eastern countries, a woman’s testimony is regularly limited in family and financial matters. This is hardly a secret.

I recall the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Barack Obama’s favorite U.S. Islamic group, used to publish a ruling on their website by one of the top Islamic jurists in the U.S. expressly forbidding Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men, saying: ”It is better to get married to a slave, bondsman than get married to a non-Muslim.”

After the ruling was pointed out by sharia critics, ISNA removed it from its website, but it still can be found at Web Archive.

Among the more laughable claims the imams made in their interview is that you need an Islamic state led by a caliph to implement penal “hudud” punishments (meaning therefore that no one is actually implementing Islamic law anymore), and that Saudi Arabia is not governed by Islamic law.

One only need look at the implementation of sharia in Islamic-majority countries around the world, and the enshrining of sharia as the ultimate source of their law codes in their respective constitutions, to see they have no problem implementing sharia in the absence of a recognized caliph or an Islamic state.

In my interview I noted that you can walk into practically any mosque or Islamic bookstore and pick up books like Mohamed S. El-Awa’s Punishment in Islamic Law, which is published by American Trust Publications, the publishing arm of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which owns and operates hundreds of mosques around the country. In El-Awa’s book, you find helpful advice on “How the hand should be cut off (Makan al-Qati’),” “Stoning as punishment (al-Rajm),” “Flogging (al-Jald),” and “The Death Penalty (al-Ta’zir bil-Qatl).”

The same is true for another manual of Islamic law from the Shafi’i school of jurisprudence published in America – translated in English and approved by many global Islamic authorities – called “Reliance of the Traveller (sic).” Book O is dedicated to “jihad,” and they don’t mean “internal struggle.” Again, these are books marketed directly to American Muslims.

And let’s not forget the imam last July, as reported by Reuters, who tried to cut off the hand of one of the mosque attendees accused of stealing. But this wasn’t Cairo, Tehran or Riyadh. This happened in Philadelphia. Did this imam misunderstand Islam?

When Glenn asked about the notorious Islamic hadith that says the rocks and trees will shout out to Muslims, “there is a Jew behind me, come kill him,” they rightly said it was not found in the Quran. Yet when Glenn asked further whether it was found in the hadith, Bakhach falsely claimed it was fabricated/inauthentic:

Glenn: I mean, our president just accused Christians of slaughtering people, you know, during the Crusades, but there’s been a reformation. There’s no reformation in Islam. I mean, for instance, the Qur’an says that the trees and the rocks will cry out there is a Jew hiding behind.

Imam Bakhach: It’s not true.

Glenn: It’s not true?

Imam Bakhach: No, I challenge you to bring me that. What’s her name, Barbara Walters, she challenged the minister of education in Saudi Arabia in his palace. I remember that years back.

Glenn: It is in the charter of Hamas.

Imam Bakhach: I don’t know about Hamas. I’ve nothing to do with that issue, but here we are here as Muslim too. You are referring to me that the Qur’an as in the God mentioned in this book, what you are saying about, the cry, that’s not true.

Glenn: Is it in the hadith?

Imam Bakhach: I’m sorry?

Glenn: Is it in the hadith?

Imam Bakhach: This is fabricated.

Glenn: It’s fabricated? There is no place in any Islamic scripture that says that?

Imam Bakhach: No. You know, when you have every, let’s say the hadith sciences, I’m talking about, they have the sound hadith. They have weak hadith. They have a preferable hadith, so the ranking, more than 23 ranks and levels of hadith sciences that the scholars worked very hard on this to verify how many people added to what is not from. That’s the point.

But Imam Bakhach’s claim that this hadith is “fabricated,” or inauthentic, is a flat-out lie, Barbara Walters notwithstanding.

I heard Allah’s Apostle saying, “The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me; kill him!’”

And again, in Sahih Muslim, he recounts at length the chain of transmission related to Mohammed’s saying (Book 41, Numbers 6980-6985).

Thaur b. Zaid has narrated this hadith with the same chain of transmitters.

Ibn ‘Umar reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: You will fight against the Jews and you will kill them until even a stone would say: Come here, Muslim, there is a Jew (hiding himself behind me) ; kill him.

Ubaidullah has reported this hadith with this chain of transmitters (and the Words are):” There is a Jew behind me.”

Abdullah b. ‘Umar reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: You and the Jews would fight against one another until a stone would say: Muslim, here is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.

Abdullah b. ‘Umar reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: The Jews will fight against you and you will gain victory over them until the stone would say: Muslim, here is a Jew behind me; kill him.

Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

And what about the treatment of non-Muslim minorities under Islamic law?

This past November, the Associated Press published a report about how sharia courts were being used in “moderate Muslim” Malaysia against Christians and other religious minorities to circumvent civil court rulings on custody and other related family matters.

Thus far gone unmentioned regarding the sharia court in Texas is whose authority this court is operating under, what sources of Islamic law they will be using to apply their brand of “justice,” and what Islamic bodies they are accountable to.

Current FCNA chairman Muzammil Siddiqi served as translator for the Blind Sheik just two months before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and after meeting with President Bush in 2001, a former Secret Service agent admitted that they knew at the time about his “association with terrorist organizations.”

Former FCNA chairman Taha Jaber Al-Awani was named by federal prosecutors “unindicted co-conspirator number 5″ in the trial of Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian (who was deported by US authorities last week), and Al-Awani’s institute shut down after authorities raided it in 2004 and revoked the visas of 16 members of his faculty.

FCNA member Mohammed al-Hanooti has the distinction of being named unindicted co-conspirator in both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial and the 2007 Holy Land Foundation prosecution. A November 2001 internal Justice Department memorandum said that al-Hanooti was responsible for raising millions of dollars for the terrorist group Hamas.

Former NAIF president Wagdi Ghoneim left the US in December 2004 in lieu of being deported, and agreed to not try entering the US again for a decade. Ghoneim has subsequently been banned from a number of countries. Upon his departure from the US, one US official explained that Ghoenim was forced to leave because, “Frankly, our task is not to sit around and wait for people to blow up buildings.”

I could go on, but you get my point. The top practitioners of Islamic law and the top Islamic organizations dispensing it are already known to be highly problematic.

None other than Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who prosecuted the Nuremberg trials, wrote about the stark contrast between Western law and Islamic law, describing it as “an antithesis” which is focused on “duties, rather than rights”:

In any broad sense, Islamic Law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge—all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire—reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law [i.e., Islamic Law, Sharia] of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western Law…

Islamic law, on the contrary, finds its chief source in the will of Allah as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. It contemplates one community of the faithful, though they may be of various tribes and in widely separated locations. Religion, not nationalism or geography, is the proper cohesive force. The state itself is subordinate to the Qur’an, which leaves little room for additional legislation, none for criticism or dissent. This world is viewed as but the vestibule to another and a better one for the faithful, and the Qur’an lays down rules of behavior towards others and toward society to assure a safe transition. It is not possible to separate political or juristic theories from the teachings of the Prophet, which establish rules of conduct concerning religious, domestic, social, and political life. This results in a law of duties, rather than rights… (“Law in the Middle East: Origin and Development of Islamic Law,” Majid Khadduri, Herbert J. Liebesny (eds) Robert H. Jackson (forward) pp. vi-vii.)

So do you have to be an Islamophobe bent on discriminating against little girls wearing hijabs in order to be concerned about these two imams setting up sharia shop in Dallas telling us to ignore the beheading behind the curtain? Based on the duplicity shown in their own interview with Glenn Beck earlier this week, there are already reasons to be concerned.

That said, should Muslims be allowed to exercise their religious liberties as freely as any other religion, and even operate their own courts of mediation and arbitration as other religions do? Of course, just as all of those other courts are in compliance with U.S. law and don’t violate public policy (e.g., by discriminating against women and other religions). All Americans should be free to express their views free from violence or any threat of violence. And we should say unequivocally that there is no carve-out exception for Islam, or any other religion or ideology for that matter, when it comes to complying with the Constitution.

But based on the explanations from these two imams already, the experience of how sharia courts are operating in other Western countries, how Islamic law itself is implemented throughout the Muslim world, and how virtually every school of Islamic jurisprudence at some points run counter to U.S. law and public policy, casting a skeptical eye on this enterprise seems warranted.

Controversy still swirls around Obama’s comments during the National Prayer Breakfast this week, where he chastised Christians for getting on their “high horse” over the ongoing global jihad, invoking medieval abuses that occurred hundreds of years ago during the Crusades and Inquisition.

But perhaps it is Obama who should avoid getting on his high horse, since according to recently published statistics, Obama’s drone campaign has killed more people during the six years of his presidency than were killed the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition.

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago, the Bureau’s latest monthly report reveals.

Of the total killed since Obama took his oath of office on January 20 2009, at least 314 have been civilians, while the number of confirmed strikes under his administration now stands at 456.

Research by the Bureau also shows there have now been nearly nine times more strikes under Obama in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than there were under his predecessor, George W Bush.

The figures have been compiled as part of the Bureau’s monthly report into covert US drone attacks, which are run in two separate missions – one by the CIA and one for the Pentagon by its secretive special forces outfit, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

The research centers on countries outside the US’s declared war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So how does that number of 2,464 killed in Obama’s drone program — not including those killed in Iraq or Afghanistan — compare to, say, the Spanish Inquisition?

A decade ago the Vatican published the results of a six-year study of the Inquisition, including the number of those killed across Europe. With respect to the 350-year-long Inquisition in Spain, the BBC reported that the study found the following:

According to the 800-page report, the Inquisition that spread fear throughout Europe throughout the Middle Ages did not use execution or torture to anything like the extent history would have us believe.

In fact the book’s editor, Professor Agostino Borromeo, claims that in Spain only 1.8% of those investigated by the notorious Spanish Inquisition were killed.

Nonetheless, as the report was published, Pope John Paul II apologised once more for the interrogators’ excesses, expressing sorrow for “the errors committed in the service of the truth by the recourse to non-Christian methods” [...]

But the Vatican report, the product of a six-year investigation, insists that the Inquisition was not as bad as often believed.

Professor Borromeo says for example that for 125,000 trials of suspected heretics in Spain, less than 2% were executed.

A quick calculation finds that 1.8 percent of 125,000 would represent 2,250 killed during the Spanish Inquisition if Prof. Borromeo’s estimates are correct.

A man deported from Turkey back to France less than a week ago under suspicion he was trying to join ISIS attacked three police officers standing guard outside a Jewish center in Nice yesterday, in what is yet another example of what I have termed “known wolf” syndrome.

I coined that term here at PJ Media back in October following two separate terror attacks in Canada within a week of each other by two separate individuals who were already known to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I noted here that this was also the case with the Sydney hostage taker, Sheikh Haron, in December. Haron had already been convicted of harassing the widows of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and was out on bail in two other separate cases. This was true yet again with the two Kouachi brothers responsible for the massacre at the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo last month, one of whom had already been in jail on terrorism charges.

Now it seems that Moussa Coulibaly, who stabbed three police officers yesterday in Nice, was yet another “known wolf.”

Police detained Moussa Coulibaly and a suspected accomplice on Tuesday after the attack on the soldiers in front of a Jewish community center in Nice.

Border police had flagged Coulibaly to their Turkish counterparts on Jan. 28, who promptly returned him home, the French security official said on condition of anonymity because she wasn’t authorized to speak on the record.

French authorities, however, were unable to turn up enough evidence against Coulibaly to open a legal case against him.

As I’ve been regularly observing here at PJ Media since October, the recent international terror attacks have universally been committed by subjects already known to law enforcement and intelligence. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo attackers in France, they were on the no-fly list of both the U.S. and the UK.

How many more people will need to die before Western authorities begin to take sufficient action against those already known to them who intend to commit acts of terror? Sadly, we’re about to find out.

In September, Elibiary was unceremoniously removed from his fellowship position with the Department of Homeland Security, which he tried to spin as a “resignation,” but letters sent to members of Congress by DHS officials indicated he would not be reappointed.

In 2003, Elibiary was listed as a board member for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Dallas chapter, which was founded by now-convicted Hamas operative Ghassan Elashi. In 2008, federal prosecutors declared in a federal court brief that “from its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.”

In Dec 2004, Elibiary was a featured speaker at a Dallas rally honoring the Ayatollah Khomeini as a “Great Islamic Visionary,” an event the Dallas Morning News called a “disgrace.”

In October 2011, I reported exclusively here at PJ Media that Elibiary had downloaded sensitive documents by the Texas Dept. of Public Safety from a secure DHS database, and then unsuccessfully tried to shop them to the media claiming then-Gov. Rick Perry was running an “Islamophobic” operation. Despite multiple claims by top DHS officials that an internal investigation exonerated Elibiary, in Sept 2013 DHS admitted in response to the Judicial Watch FOIA request that no records related to any internal investigation existed, prompting members of Congress to claim DHS was engaged in a cover-up. Texas DPS, having conducted their own investigation, severed their relationship with Elibiary.

After 30 million Egyptians took to the streets to remove Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, leading to his ouster, Elibiary added a Muslim Brotherhood logo to his Twitter avatar in solidarity with the extremist Islamic group.

Then in a bizarre statement, he claimed that Islam is the driving force for the “Far Right” (presumably he means that hatred of the religion of Islam itself drives the “Far Right” — again another sweeping group indictment that he previously denounced):

When I started TW'n in 2012, I told y'all that the real driving force for the #FarRight is the religion of Islam itself. Hence #Islamophobia

“Christianist” is a slur invented by Leftist reactionaries to attack Christians who take their faith seriously and are politically involved. And yet if Elibiary’s co-conspirators at CAIR can denounce the use of the term “Islamist,” as they recently did, isn’t it equally bigoted and unfair to use the term “Christianist” to attack Elibiary’s perceived enemies?

But he continues, identifying “Christianist subculture” as a “problem” for Muslims, and presumably one that must be eradicated:

One is given to wonder what Elibiary’s reaction would be if someone were to simply modify his tweets to replace “Christianist subculture” with “American Islamist subculture.” Undoubtedly, he would froth at the mouth with rabid accusations of racism and “Islamophobia.”

This, however, is not remotely the first time that Christians have been the targets of Elibiary’s unbridled rage.

In September 2013, he engaged in a series of tweets attacking Egyptian Coptic Christians:

As I witnessed first-hand in Egypt last year, Elibiary’s Muslim Brotherhood allies sacked and burned down nearly 100 churches in August 2013 and launched an ongoing wave of terror targeting Copts and the government after the ouster of Morsi. During Morsi’s regime, attacks on Christians were commonplace, with the Muslim Brotherhood setting up torture chambers for Christian protesters right outside Morsi’s palace. When Christians were murdered in April 2013, a Muslim mob aided by Morsi’s police attacked the funeral service and mourners at the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo. So it’s no surprise that Christians overwhelmingly supported Morsi’s overthrow.

And the outrage of Coptic Christians is understandable when, despite all the contrary evidence, Elibiary tweets out this:

Clearly, it is long past time for Elibiary’s friends to stage a mental health intervention. And because he exhibits undeniable anti-Christian hatred and bigotry, he clearly has no place advising anyone in our government.

The African terror group Boko Haram has released an interview with their spokesman, Shaikh Abu Mus’ab Albarnawi, where he discusses the recent BH offensive in northern Nigeria, where reportedly 2,000 civilians were killed and the city of Baga and 16 surrounding villages were razed (English translation included):

Any of my regular readers here at PJ Media can attest, I am no fan of the FBI’s counter-terrorism programs. Recently, I’ve been writing about the FBI’s failures to catch “Known Wolf” terrorists – individuals who were already known to law enforcement prior to their acts of terror. So no one can accuse me of being an apologist for the bureau.

But an article yesterday in The Guardian entitled “Counter-terrorism is supposed to let us live without fear. Instead, it’s creating more of it” by two individuals currently promoting the screening of their film (T)ERROR at the Sundance International Film Festival falsely claims the FBI is engaged in a deliberate effort to entrap innocent American Muslims.

Here’s the case they make:

While making our film (T)ERROR, which tracks a single counter-terrorism sting operation over seven months, we realized that most people have serious misconceptions about FBI counter-terrorism efforts. They assume that informants infiltrate terrorist networks and then provide the FBI with information about those networks in order to stop terrorist plots from being carried out. That’s not true in the vast majority of domestic terrorism cases.

Since 9/11, as Human Rights Watch and others have documented, the FBI has routinely used paid informants not to capture existing terrorists, but to cultivate them. Through elaborate sting operations, informants are directed to spend months – sometimes years – building relationships with targets, stoking their anger and offering ideas and incentives that encourage them to engage in terrorist activity. And the moment a target takes a decisive step forward, crossing the line from aspirational to operational, the FBI swoops in to arrest him.

So they accuse the FBI of setting suspects up and then arresting them — entrapment. This “entrapment” claim is commonly repeated by defense attorneys and self-styled “civil rights” groups. In fact, that’s what the authors of The Guardian article explicitly say:

The cumulative effects of FBI surveillance and entrapment in communities of color have been devastating.

I’ll leave aside their “communities of color” smear, but there is one glaring problem with their entrapment claim: in no single jihadist-related terrorism trial since the 9/11 attacks has a federal court on ANY LEVEL found that the FBI engaged in entrapment. Many suspects have made the claim, but none have successfully argued it. In only one case I remember, that of Ahmadullah Niazi, did the Justice Department voluntarily drop an indictment because of the reliability of an informant.

Those who peddle these FBI entrapment claims have been found to regularly play fast and loose with data, such as describing terror conspirators who turn state’s evidence against their partners and are sentenced to jail for their roles in terror plots as “informants.”

Another tactic taken is to equate the involvement of an informant as a de facto case of entrapment, as do the authors of The Guardian article. They cite the arrest earlier this month of a Cincinnati-area man:

A recent example: on 14 January, the FBI announced that it had interrupted an Isis-inspired terrorist plot in the United States. Christopher Lee Cornell, a 20-year-old recent Muslim convert from Cincinnati, was allegedly plotting to attack the US Capitol with pipe bombs and gun down government officials.

But then they make a colossal leap with this non sequitur:

Cornell was arrested after purchasing two semiautomatic weapons from an Ohio gun store because the man that Cornell thought was his partner was actually an FBI informant.

So the reason he bought the weapons was because there was an informant? In the information made available so far, there’s no indication that’s the case. If the record of every single jihad-related terror case since 9/11 is any guide, it’s unlikely their claim will stand. One reason why these terrorism cases have universally withstood scrutiny by the federal courts are the extensive measures taken by the FBI to prevent entrapment.

As an example of how far the FBI will go to prevent someone from turning to terror, consider the case of 19-year-old Colorado woman Shannon Conley, who was sentenced last week to four years in prison. As the court record shows, the FBI repeatedly warned Conley over a period of months not to attempt to travel to Syria to join ISIS and even talked to her parents asking them to intervene. And yet she persisted in her plans and was arrested trying to board a plane bound for Turkey. Now her parents are saying “the terrorists have won” after her sentencing, blaming the federal government for prosecuting their daughter.

Those who characterize the FBI’s activities in this case as ‘entrapment’ simply do not have their facts straight or do not have a full understanding of the law.

And yet The Guardian regurgitates a number of howlers, such as this:

And on campuses across the country, Muslim student associations have banned discussions of politics, terrorism and the “war on terror.”

But Muslim Student Associations (MSA) have had no trouble at all discussing politics, terrorism and the “war on terror.” In fact, you can’t shut them up from talking about it. One topic you won’t hear addressed at MSA meetings, however, is the long litany of senior MSA leaders who have been convicted in terrorism cases.

In the absence of actual evidence, The Guardian authors have to resort to anecdotes, including this one:

After a recent screening of our film at a New York City mosque, a young African-American convert to Islam, sporting a brown full-body covering with matching hijab, confessed to us that she feels uncomfortable discussing aspects of her identity. She does not speak about her religious conversion in public, for fear of attracting or encouraging informants.

Yes, because wearing a brown full-body covering with a matching hijab, no one would ever know she’s a Muslim.

This is how laughably ridiculous those who peddle this false narrative have sunk. Perhaps a review of some of the jihad-related terror cases where FBI informants weren’t involved is warranted:

Beltway snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo

UNC-Chapel Hill vehicle jihadist Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar

Seattle Jewish Federation killer Naveed Afzal Haq

Little Rock killer Carlos Bledsoe (aka Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad)

Fort Hood killer Major Nidal Hasan

Would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad

Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Cross-country jihadist spree killer Ali Muhammad Brown

Undoubtedly, if FBI informants had been used in any of these cases to prevent their terror attacks, The Guardian authors, Islamic “civil rights” groups and their ilk would be crying “entrapment.”

The New York Times launched some weapons-grade stupidity on Sunday with an article by Rod Nordland and Eric Schmitt citing “experts” claiming that the Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen that have swept though critical parts of the country, including the capital Sanaa, are not just moderates, but possible U.S. counter-terrorism partners.

Because of the ongoing Houthi offensive, Yemen’s information minister admitted last week that the government had lost effective control of the country.

Thankfully, the Times is here to assure us that when the Houthis shout “Death to America” they really don’t mean it:

At first glance the official slogan and emblem of the Houthis, who are now the dominant force in Yemen, does not offer much hope to American policy makers.

It includes the words “Death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews.” Houthis shout it when they march, wear it on arm patches, paint it on buildings and stick it onto their car windows. When pictured, those words are rendered in red, framed by “God is great” and “Victory to Islam” in green, on a white background.

Sometimes the red words are shown dripping blood.

But for all their harsh sloganeering, the Houthis may be a lot more moderate than it suggests, according to many diplomats and analysts who have followed them closely. They say it would be premature to dismiss them as Yemen’s Hezbollah, despite their alliance with Iran.

For reference purposes, here’s the slogan in question:

The logo of Yemen's triumphant Houthis:
Allahu akbar
Death to America
Death to Israel
Damn the Jews
Victory to Islam pic.twitter.com/BOQSpAFCDD

Ah, but we have nothing to fear, because they fight Al-Qaeda says the Pentagon:

On Wednesday, Michael G. Vickers, the Pentagon’s top intelligence policy official, noted that the Houthis’ dominance had been growing over the past several months as they expanded their control since last September, but he said that has not interfered with American missions. “The Houthis are anti-Al Qaeda, and we’ve been able to continue some of our counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda in the past couple months,” Mr. Vickers said.

And they’re nothing like yet another Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, say the “experts”:

“The Houthis are not Hezbollah,” said Charles Schmitz, an expert on the group and a professor at Towson University, referring to the Iranian-supported group that dominates Lebanon and is actively fighting on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “They are domestic, homegrown, and have very deep roots in Yemen, going back thousands of years.”

In fact, they could be U.S. counter-terrorism partners if they only dropped their “Death to America” sloganeering (!!) the “experts” continue:

April Alley, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Sana, said: “Theoretically there is quite a bit of common ground in Yemen between the Houthis and the U.S., particularly when it comes to security issues and Al Qaeda. But so far it’s not been enough to overcome the obstacles. The Houthis have their own limits in which they can engage the Americans given the political narrative they have propagated.”

It should be noted that last week a U.S. Embassy vehicle carrying U.S. personnel was shot up at a Houthi checkpoint:

The FBI has arrested an Ohio man for allegedly plotting an ISIS-inspired attack on the U.S. Capitol, where he hoped to set off a series of bombs aimed at lawmakers, whom he allegedly considered enemies.

Christopher Lee Cornell, 20, of Green Township, was arrested today on charges of attempting to kill a U.S. government official, authorities said.

According to government documents, he allegedly planned to detonate pipe bombs at the national landmark and open fire on any employees and officials fleeing after the explosions.

The FBI first noticed Cornell several months ago after an informant notified the agency that Cornell was allegedly voicing support for violent “jihad” on Twitter accounts under the alias “Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah,” according to charging documents. In addition, Cornell allegedly posted statements, videos and other content expressing support for ISIS — the brutal terrorist group also known as ISIL — that is wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria.

“I believe that we should just wage jihad under our own orders and plan attacks and everything,” Cornell allegedly wrote in an online message to the informant in August, according to the FBI. “I believe we should meet up and make our own group in alliance with the Islamic State here and plan operations ourselves.”

In the message, Cornell said that such attacks “already got a thumbs up” from radical cleric Anwar Awlaki “before his martyrdom.”

It looks like both his Facebook and Twitter accounts have already been deactivated.

First, I have many friends and colleagues who work in the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings.

Second, this suspect comes from Ohio, where I live. For years I’ve been writing about the problem of Islamic radicalization in my home state, including here at PJ Media. For several years I maintained a running blog with Ohio-related terrorism news.

Third, my colleague Steve Coughlin and I were at an event in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in February 2012 when Amine El-Khalifi was arrested heading towards the Visitor Center with what he thought was a suicide bomb strapped to himself. Fortunately, it was an FBI sting operation. As we left the event we noticed that Capitol Police were stationed about every 30 yards with M4 rifles at the ready. I keep my visitor’s badge from that day on my desk to remind me of how close I came to (potential) danger:

The deputy social media editor of The Daily Beast, Asawin Suebsaeng, has some profound thoughts on Cornell’s arrest:

guy trying to blow up the Capitol is from Ohio. the guy who wanted to kill Boehner? Ohio. WHEN WILL THE MODERATE OHIOANS SOMETHING SOMETHING

The ISIS “Raqaa Media Office” has just published a new video in which one fighter promises to bring attacks to France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States (begins at approximately 0:56).

The first fighter concludes with:

Whoever was shocked and amazed must comprehend, the Muslims today have a loud and thundering voice, and possess heavy boots. They will have a statement that will cause the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism, and boots that will trample the idol of nationalism, destroy the idol of democracy and its falseness.

The second fighter calls for Muslims to rise up:

For the time has come to free yourself from the shackles of weakness and stand in the face of tyranny.

The third fighter rails against “the agents of the crusaders and the atheists, and the guardians of the Jews,” and talks about “the joys of the mujahidin on the occasion of the Islamic Khalifah announcement and their renewed pledge to the Imam.” He concludes by asking Muslims to pledge allegiance along with him by reciting the bayat.

Last week’s terror attack targeting French magazine Charlie Hebdo‘s office in Paris has sparked a global conversation about the nature of free speech, with the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag in support of the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff going viral and becoming the most used hashtag in the history of Twitter.

But this afternoon, the UN representative for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ufuk Gokcen, was expressing another view with respect to free speech.

The OIC is comprised of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and the Palestinian Authority. They are the largest bloc at the UN, and when they meet on the head-of-state level, they literally speak for the Muslim world.

Today, University of Tennessee law professor Robert Blitt (a colleague of our own Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds) had an oped published in USA Today calling out the OIC for its retrograde views on free speech and how they fuel Islamic extremism:

The OIC, whose member states range from moderate U.S. allies such as Jordan to adversaries such as Iran, describes itself as the world’s largest international body after the United Nations. For more than a decade, “the collective voice of the Muslim world” has spread the belief that any insult directed against the Muslim faith or its prophet demands absolute suppression. Quashing “defamation of Islam” is enshrined as a chief objective in the organization’s charter.

With countless internal resolutions, relentless lobbying of the international community and block voting on resolutions advocating a prohibition on defamation of religion at the U.N., the OIC continuously pushes to silence criticism of Islam.

Translated into practice inside Islamic nations and increasingly elsewhere, this toxic vision breeds contempt for freedom of religion and expression, justifies the killing of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and casts a pall of self-censorship over academia and the arts.

By building the expectation that dissent or insult merits suppression, groups such as the OIC and the Arab League have emboldened extremists to take protection of Islam to the next level. With the most authoritative Muslim voices prepared to denounce violence but not to combat the idea that Islam should be immune from criticism, a meaningful response to counteract the resulting violence continues to be glaringly absent.

An OIC statement released after a 2011 Charlie Hebdo issue “guest-edited” by the prophet Mohammed typifies this troubling position: “Publication of the insulting cartoon … was an outrageous act of incitement and hatred and abuse of freedom of expression. … The publishers and editors of the Charlie Hebdo magazine must assume full responsibility for their … incitement of religious intolerance.”

As Professor Blitt notes in his oped, the OIC has been the international driving force behind the passage of Resolution 16/18, which was co-sponsored by Pakistan and the United States and passed in December 2011.

When passed, Resolution 16/18 was billed by the Obama administration as an improvement over previous “defamation of religion” resolutions. But the effort immediately came under fire from religious liberties and free speech experts:

In the view of veteran international religious liberty analyst and advocate Elizabeth Kendal resolution 16/18, “far from being a breakthrough for free speech … is actually more dangerous than” the religious defamation resolutions.

“Indeed, the strategic shift from defamation to incitement actually advances the OIC’s primary goal: the criminalization of criticism of Islam,” she wrote.

The OIC’s push to criminalize “defamation of Islam” goes back to the OIC’s 10 Year Plan of Action adopted in 2005. Under the section “Countering Islamophobia” (VII), the plan says:

3. Endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments.

In their published implementation plan for their 10 Year Plan of Action, they are more clear that combating “defamation of religion” is not what they were after, but rather criminalizing “Islamophobia”:

Which is effectively what they’ve accomplished with the generous assistance of the Obama administration. Just two months before the passage of Resolution 16/18, senior Justice Department officials were meeting with U.S. Islamic groups discussing that very thing.

It’s hardly surprising that even after the Charlie Hebdo attack the OIC is not content to abandon their decade-long effort to criminalize “Islamophobia.” But, much as Professor Blitt has warned in his oped today, by doing so they are pushing the global Islamic community further away from the rest of the world.

A bizarre report from NBC News by Ayman Mohyeldin this morning broadcast during Meet the Press highlighted the city of Dearborn, Michigan, which has the highest Muslim population concentration of any city in America, as a beacon of American Muslim integration.

For some, radicalization and attacks against the U.S. stems from anger at American foreign policies and wars in the Middle East. While the overwhelming majority of muslims have successfully assimilated and integrated into U.S. society, the challenge remains to find individuals who may be on the fringes of the communities and are also alienated.

There are some curious omissions from Mohyeldin’s report that directly question his claims of successful assimilation and integration of Muslims in Dearborn.

For instance, last August The Interceptpublished an internal assessment by the National Counterterrorism Center showing that Dearborn — a town of less than 100,000 — had the second largest number of known terrorism suspects in the country behind New York City.

Needless to say, the Muslim community in Dearborn expressed outrage at the NCTC’s data analysis. And despite the fact the NCTC report was the Obama administration’s own document and the finding was the expression of raw data, Detroit U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade joined local activists at a news conference to denounce those findings.

The loss of life in Baga and Boko Haram’s control over 70 percent of Borno State will undoubtedly require greater action by the Nigerian government and possibly greater intervention from neighboring Chad and Cameroon.

I will update this post as new information becomes available.

UPDATE:

More news reports are coming out of Nigeria regarding the Boko Haram attack on the city of Baga and surrounding areas in Borno State.

AFP is reporting that 16 villages have been razed to the ground and tens of thousands displaced:

Boko Haram razed at least 16 towns and villages in a renewed assault after capturing a key military base in restive northeast Nigeria at the weekend, local officials said on Thursday.

Heavy casualties were feared in the attacks on Wednesday in the remote north of Borno state, according to local sources, but there was no independent corroboration of the figures cited.

Musa Bukar, head of the Kukawa local government area, said: “They (Boko Haram) burnt to the ground all the 16 towns and villages, including Baga, Doron-Baga, Mile 4, Mile 3, Kauyen Kuros and Bunduram.”

Abubakar Gamandi, head of Borno’s fish traders union and a Baga native, also confirmed the attacks, adding that hundreds of people who fled were trapped on islands on Lake Chad.

More than 2,000 people are unaccounted for after radical Islamist sect Boko Haram torched more than 10 towns and villages in Nigeria, a local lawmaker told NBC News. Ahmed Zanna, a senator for Borno state where the attack happened, said the militants razed the town of Baga as well as “10-to-20″ other communities in the country’s rural northeast over the past five days. “These towns are just gone, burned down,” he told NBC News via telephone. “The whole area is covered in bodies.”

Zanna said he had spoken to residents who fled the towns. They reported that the spree had been ongoing since Boko Haram overran a nearby military base Saturday. During the days-long assault, the militants chased people out of Baga before returning to kill those left and torch the buildings to the ground, according to survivors who contacted Zanna. Some of those who survived fled on foot the 100 miles south to Maidurguri.

The government’s response to this massacre will be worth watching. Presidential elections are scheduled for Feb. 14th, and criticism of incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan is mounting. Thus, Jonathan’s government will be eager to suppress information about this attack.

Boko Haram’s response will need to be followed as well. After routing Nigerian government forces at the military base outside of Baga, they are now in effective control of Borno State, which borders Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Earlier today Bridget Johnson here at PJ Media noted John Kerry’s shout-out to Dalil Boubakeur, the head of the French Muslim Council and one of the largest mosques in Paris. Boubakeur told Le Figaro that today’s attack targeting those who worked for the French magazine Charlie Hebdo was “a thunderous declaration of war.”

Bridget noted that Kerry hailed “the French iman who today called the slain journalists martyrs for liberty.”

Er, just one problem.

As noted earlier today by French bloggers, in 2006 at the height of the Danish Cartoon crisis, Boubakeur had published an article denouncing the cartoons and concluded by issuing a warning to all those — including Charlie Hebdo — who would publish caricatures of Mohammed, saying: “He who sows the whirlwind shall reap the whirlwind.”

Undoubtedly, Boubakeur is yet another graduate of the State Department’s vaunted “vetted moderate” program.

This incident is reminiscent of the Huffington Post promoting last August a so-called “fatwa against terrorism” issued after 9/11 that was signed by individuals who had been designated terrorists by the U.S. government.

A similar fatwa was issued in the U.S. in 2005 by the Fiqh Council of North America, whose signatories included my former neighbor, Salah Sultan, who is currently in prison in Egypt on terrorism charges and has a long history of openly supporting terrorism.

The moral of the story is: beware of self-proclaimed “moderates” — especially ones promoted by the Obama administration — following terror attacks.

Back in October after two separate terror attacks in Canada, I coined the term “Known Wolf Syndrome” since, as I noted, in many of these terror cases the suspects are already known to law enforcement authorities. I recounted a number of similar instances of U.S. domestic terrorism.

I noted the same problem again last month when Sheikh Haron took hostages in a chocolate shop in downtown Sydney, Australia.

Now, early reports from the Paris attack earlier today are indicating that one of the suspects is yet another “known wolf” who tried to send men to fight in Iraq:

One of the alleged assailants, K. Sherif, is already well known to the police. He was tried in 2005 for being part of a chain of sending jihadists in Iraq, nicknamed “the Iraqi chain of the 19th district of Paris.” With a dozen cronies, he would have led a dozen young people from fighting in Iraq between 2003 and 2005. He was arrested in 2005, when he was preparing himself from Iraq. (Google Translate)

We’ll wait to see if the other two suspects end up previously known to authorities as well.

Dutch journalist Frederike Geerdink, who covers Kurdish affairs, had her home raided and was arrested this morning in Turkey and accused of “propaganda for a terrorist organization,” she announced on Twitter:

terrorism police just searched my house, team of 8 guys. they take me to the station now. charge: 'propaganda for terrorist organization'

What makes Geerdink’s arrest so ironic is that she has openly dismissed the creeping authoritarianism in Turkey in recent years, such as this tweet in 2012:

Under the rule of Islamist president Recep Erdogan, Turkey has grown increasingly tyrannical, seen especially in the targeting of journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists has noted special concern for the press in Turkey, and even the New York Times has noted that Turkey has become the world’s leading “jailhouse of journalists.”

Perhaps even more troubling is that President Obama has identified Erdogan as one of his top 5 international friends. It will be interesting if the State Department gets asked about Geerdink’s arrest today.

UPDATE: The Turkish government has given its official reason for detaining Geerdink – comments on Twitter:

Last Saturday I broke the story here at PJ Media that Congressman Andre Carson — one of only two Muslim congressmen — had been scheduled to speak at a panel at the Muslim American Society (MAS) – Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) annual convention held last weekend in Chicago. I noted that the panel included Mazen Mokhtar, who, as federal agents have testified in federal court, helped run an Al-Qaeda website that raised money for the Taliban.

At the time, Carson’s scheduled appearance on the panel was noted on the convention’s online program. Within the past 48 hours, his name was removed from the website.